Yes, absolutely. Vastly. Hugely.
As someone who's worked in video delivery, I can't overstate how much the majority prefers not to have stutters in their video while sitting on a subway/bus/train/massive SUV.
As someone who's worked in video delivery, I can't overstate how much the majority prefers not to have stutters in their video while sitting on a subway/bus/train/massive SUV.
I'm not surprised it's a similar tale with video delivery.
In my experience, what frustrated me most was predictable stalls every 10s or so. I don't see that much any more.
Personally I use yt-dlp with mpv and have the buffer set very large. This allows me to pause the stream when I take a toilet break or similar. When I come back I can also skip ahead through ads or idle times on the stream, or watch at increased speed to catch up if needed.
I was thinking of experiences on YouTube where it refuses to buffer enough to allow playing the whole video, leading to inevitable stutters.
A full minute of buffering would only give about 5% more bandwidth for a typical 22 minute TV show. That’s not going to transform it from “something unwatchable” to the higher bitrate video you want.
It will, however, cause a large majority of people to give up on the stream. The number of people who would actually prefer 1 minute of buffering for negligibly higher quality is almost nonexistent.
This is why buffering is futile: Once a stream gets to the point of stopping to buffer, the mismatch between available bandwidth and the encoded bitrate is just too great to reasonably overcome.
For your point, an example is viewing 1080p on 64kbit/s is unreasonable and nothing will fix it.
For OP's point, I can imagine viewing 1080p (10Mbit/s) on a 1Gbit/s connection means a little buffer will solve the need for ABR as random packet loss or minor drops can be recovered with retries seamlessly as opposed to dropping quality to ABR.
So buffering is futile only when bandwidth is not sufficient, and even there its questionable, perhaps user might just want to download and view after that's complete rather then have poor quality.
YouTube is very aggressive about switching to bad quality if it thinks the connection is bad, which happens often due to transient issues on cell networks or occasionally wifi. All of a sudden a video will drop to 240p, for instance, reminding me "ah, it reset itself to 'auto', I never ever want 'auto'".
A minute of buffering isn't enough to make an incredibly slow connection fast. But a minute (or potentially less) of buffering is enough to paper over transient connection issues.